A man to be very much pitied was poor Mr Roberts. Not only had he to pacify the priest, but Mistress Grena’s line of defence, plausible as it sounded, had unhappily crossed and invalidated the excuse he had intended to make for himself. His faint, hazy purpose up to that time had been to deny any knowledge of the escape; but after it had been thus represented as a natural, every-day occurrence, how was he to keep up the story? Yet he had no other ready.
“No, Father—ay, it—I was a-bed,” was his blundering reply.
The priest’s voice was sweet as a newly-tuned piano.
“Was it not strange, my son, that you heard no sounds from beneath? Or went you up, knowing what was passing?”
What was the poor man to do? If he acknowledged that he knew of the escape of the fugitives, he laid himself open to the charge of “aiding and abetting”; if he denied it, he practically denied also the truth of Grena’s defence. At that moment he would have given every acre and shilling in his possession to be free from this horrible cross-questioning.
The cat watched the poor mouse wriggle with grim satisfaction. Either way, it would come to its claws at last.
Suddenly the scene of the morning was reproduced to the mind’s eye of the tortured man. Roger Hall’s voice seemed to say again—“Have you asked Him, Master?” Faintly, tremblingly in the unwontedness of the act, the request was made, and even that slight contact with the unchanging Rock steadied the wavering feet. He must speak truth, and uphold Grena.
“Father,” he said in a changed tone, “my sister told you true. The journey was hastened, and that suddenly.”
The change in his tone puzzled the priest. What had come to the man, in that momentary interval, to nerve him thus anew?
“How came the news, my son?”